Stealing an election in broad daylight

Republicans are following the time-honored Southern tradition of disenfranchising voters.

Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs has won the election for Supreme Court, defeating Jefferson Dav—I mean, Griffin in the final vote count, a machine recount, and a hand recount of 3% of the votes. But Griffin and the GOP aren’t done yet.

Republicans are randomly questioning the votes of 60,000 voters. That’s more than one percent of all North Carolinians who cast a ballot in November. They have no real reason to believe any of these people’s votes are illegitimate. They don’t even hope to find enough phony votes to give Griffin the lead. Their goal is to cast doubt on the outcome of the election and have the results nullified, leading to a new special election. In other words, they are trying to steal an election in broad daylight.

North Carolina has long had laws on the books that allow people to challenge the legitimacy of votes. They’ve been used over the years, but almost always in narrow circumstances. Griffin’s wide net is unprecedented and designed to cause confusion by disrupting the democratic process, not clarifying election results.

Let’s be clear about what Griffin and his attorneys are doing. They are harassing people who cast votes legitimately. Every person who voted in-person presented an ID that matched their voter registration information, so there’s no doubt these voters met the eligibility requirements. They are looking to disqualify voters based on incomplete information on their original voter registration form, things like a missing number from their drivers license or social security number. These voters already had their applications accepted and verified by some county board of elections, some many years ago.

Now, Griffin is trying to disenfranchise them after the fact. It’s preposterous, dangerous, and un-American. It’s the stuff of authoritarians.

According to an analysis by the News & Observer, Black voters are more than twice as likely to have their votes challenged as white voters. Votes of people under 25 years old are disproportionately having their votes challenged, too. Both of these constituencies vote for Democrats more often than Republicans. Their tactics bear out the court ruling that GOP disenfranchisement schemes “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Republicans are following a time-honored reactionary populist tradition of disenfranchising voters by making onerous rules to voting. Jim Crow was launched by creating all kinds of poll tests and poll taxes to keep unwanted voters out of the voting booth. Henry Frye, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of North Carolina and the first African American elected to the legislature in the 20th century, was unable to register to vote because of onerous literacy tests. Defenders of Jim Crow voter suppression claimed they were just the rules of voting. Likewise, Griffin’s attacks use rules to selectively harass voters and cast doubt on the legitimacy of an election that was administered fairly and honestly.

The end game for Griffin is to cast enough doubt that the election ends up in front of a compliant state Supreme Court that would order a new election. I would hope that the court would assert its independence and side with the process, but I have my doubts. So far, they’ve behaved more as a partisan body than an independent one, ignoring precedent and disregarding findings of previous courts.

Republicans have spent the past decade trying undermine elections either through onerous rules for voting that disproportionally impact Democratic-leaning voters or by neutering the State Board of Elections. The GOP bill that would move the SBOE from the governor’s office to the auditor’s office is an attempt to make what Griffin is doing now easier to accomplish in the future. Republicans want to remove obstacles to their attempts to steal elections by making rules that favor them and hurt Democrats. Whatever objections they may have had to that characterization of their motives have been exposed as false by Griffin’s brazen disregard for the sanctity of the vote.